More Allegations of Race/Gender/Etc. Focus in Harvard Law Review Screening Process
From Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon):
When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.
The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted "selectively" from "five internal memos going back more than three years," adding that the Harvard Law Review "considers several thousand submissions annually."
"The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication," the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.
But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about "author diversity." And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that "we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors."
There's a lot more there; worth reading the whole thing. If there's a response from the Harvard Law Review or otherwise, I'll of course be glad to link to that as well. Seems to me valuable to know more about how an institution that has historically aimed to be seen as a leading scholarly journal, rather than just as an ideological advocacy organization, actually operates.
Note that there are also separate questions (1) whether a law review's race-based selection decisions (if such have been made) violate antidiscrimination law (see, e.g., Michael Dorf's posts exploring that), and (2) whether a law review might have a First Amendment defense to any such charges. But at this point I'm just particularly interested in what such journals are actually doing.